CentOS Backup – How to Backup a Full CentOS Server

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I switched a few weeks ago from a dedicated server to a VPS. Now that everything is working well on the VPS I would like to shutdown the dedicated server and close my account with the hosting company.

For peace of mind and in order to be more safe I would like to do a full backup of the server before stopping it.

The best would be a backup that I could browse if I find that I need a something in the backup.

What would be the best solution from command line?

Update :

Medium : Network

Best Answer

The best tool to use for this is probably dump, which is a standard linux tool and will give you the whole filesystem. I would do something like this: 

/sbin/dump -0uan -f - / | gzip -2 | ssh -c blowfish user@backupserver.example.com dd of=/backup/server-full-backup-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`.dump.gz

This will do a file system dump of / (make sure you don't need to dump any other mounts!), compress it with gzip and ssh it to a remote server (backupserver.example.com), storing it in /backup/. If you later need to browse the backup you use restore: 

restore -i

Another option, if you don't have access to dump is to use tar and do something like

tar -zcvpf /backup/full-backup-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`.tar.gz --directory / --exclude=mnt --exclude=proc --exclude=tmp .

But tar does not handle changes in the file system as well.

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